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The heroic Clipper staff crawled through the aisles on their knees, handing out and retrieving vomit bag after vomit bag. There's something really special about the smell of hundreds of sweaty, anxious, vomiting people on a boat.
We each found our ways to cope.
One of my friends put on his noise-canceling headphones and put his head between his knees. Another began to determine which of us were strong swimmers and who she would need to rescue first.
I, on the other hand, held on tight to my seat, stared straight ahead and transported myself to my house with my cats.
What's Nellie doing? Probably sleeping. Ruby? She's playing with her toys. Yep. And I'm there, on the couch with them. Mmm-hmm. Good.
It wasn't until a wave hit so hard that a window popped open a bit and some water splashed into the cabin that I started to feel unsafe. A woman screamed. Another put on her life vest.
Only then did a staff member come onto the loud speaker, apologetically announcing that we had more bad weather to get through, that they had expected us to get there before the storm, and that we were in no danger.
We are in no danger. OK. I just have to keep myself from getting ill and let them get us there safely.
Let them drive the boat.
Eventually, we pulled up to the dock in Victoria. We disembarked, exhausted and unable to stop laughing anxiously.
Of the five of us, the two who were least prone to seasickness were the ones who tossed their cookies. The rest of us were so proud we had made it through we continued to brag about it for days.
We had made plans for all sorts of activities when we got to town bars, restaurants, the Royal BC Museum, maybe even a chilly trip to the Butchart Gardens. Instead, all we wanted to do was hunker down in our Airbnb with wine and a home-cooked meal.
We ate, we drank, we talked, we played games and we made way too many Clipper survivor jokes. We bonded. Nothing like a rendezvous with an angry Mother Nature to bring you closer together.
I redeemed myself on the return to Seattle. I hadn't been lying a ride on the Clipper can be glorious. (And it sounds like it might become even more glorious the fleet has been updated with a newer, bigger boat, the Clipper V, which Meis says should be able to handle those waves a bit better.) The way back was so smoot...
When we approached the dock in Seattle, my boyfriend turned to me and said, "Well, Paige. You wanted an adventure ... you got it."
And believe it or not I'm glad it happened. Travel won't always be a smooth experience; trouble sometimes comes in waves. But experiences like that can build confidence and remind you that you can make it through stressful situations, that you should trust the professionals to bring you to safety, and that somewhere in...
Cheers to my beloved Clipper survivors; I'm booking next February's trip as we speak.
Sun Country downgraded my mom's ticket. Where's her refund?
A hero dog named Todd was bitten in the face while trying to protect his owner from a hissing rattlesnake during a morning hike through the Arizona desert.
Paula Godwin recounted the incident on Facebook, where she revealed that she was on a walk in Phoenix with Todd and another of her dogs when she almost stepped on a rattlesnake that was slithering through the brush.
Because Todd is a puppy and is lower to the ground than Godwin, he courageously jumped to her rescue and was promptly bitten in the snout. Todd was taken to a local animal hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.
Todd has a swollen snout and a bandage on his right paw but is otherwise doing well. Fortunately, Todd has been healing very quickly, and the swelling is rapidly going down.
“He’s doing so well. He is a wonder to me how he is healing,” Godwin wrote in a follow-up post.
Paula Godwin posted another photo of Todd in a superhero cape.
Dogs add a lot to people’s lives. In addition to providing companionship (especially for older people who live alone), dogs relieve stress, reduce blood pressure, and improve your mood, according to the medical journal Frontiers in Psychology.
The presence of a dog in a classroom at school has been shown to reduce aggressive behavior in a study of first-graders. “In two studies, effects of the presence of friendly dogs on aggressive behavior in a classroom of first-graders were investigated via behavior observation and reports of the classroom teacher,” acco...
A recent study also found that men with AIDS were less likely to suffer from depression if they owned a pet. Similarly, the benefits of service dogs like police canines, bomb-sniffing combat dogs, and seeing-eye dogs are well-documented.
Sadly, many drug-sniffing police dogs are inadvertently overdosing on the job, leading to premature deaths for these hardworking canines, as the Inquisitr previously reported.
--Promotion to sergeant requires completion of the Basic (formerly Warrior) Leader Course.
--Promotion to staff sergeant requires completion of the Advanced Leader Course.
--Promotion to sergeant first class requires completion of the Senior Leader Course.
Since the 1980s, the Army has allowed "conditional promotions," where Soldiers could get their stripes without having completed the corresponding professional military education (PME). Recently, the Army announced the establishment of the Noncommissioned Officer Professional Development System (NCOPDS); an organization...
The Army is committed to ensuring all Soldiers are provided full career opportunities to reach their highest potential and enhance overall Army readiness. This will be achieved in part by continuing to shape policies that support and sustain our highly capable and ready force.
These requirements are enhancements to the Army's talent management system, which ensures its NCOs are properly developed and prepared to fight and win in a complex world as adaptive, agile leaders and trusted professionals. Additionally, Army leadership endorses that education provides academically, intellectually, an...
It is definitely more of a mental challenge than physical. If you mentally know you want to get through -- and you have to want to get through -- than you will make it.
Google's plan to scan "orphan books" into its ever-growing database of digital texts has led a watchdog group to call on the U.S. Department of Justice to step into the matter. Critics say that Google is in a position to exert a virtual monopoly over digitized books, and prevent Microsoft, Yahoo or any other future com...
Google's recent and far-flung attempt to digitize the world's "orphan" books, or out-of-print tomes that remain under copyright but whose rights-holders cannot be found, may soon hit a roadblock in the form of the U.S. Department of Justice, at least if a consumer group gets its wish.
John Simpson, a consumer advocate for Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking the government to intervene in Google's recent settlement with The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
That settlement over Google's digital book-scanning, Simpson wrote, affects the publishing industry too sweepingly to have been closed without any sort of government review.
"Because the settlement was negotiated between the parties in a class action suit, there has been little opportunity to represent the interests of consumers," Simpson explained. "This deal furthers the relatively narrow agenda of Google, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers."
The terms of the settlement create a nonprofit Book Rights Registry to handle digital rights issues. It includes a "most favored nation clause" guaranteeing Google the same terms as any future competitor, such as Yahoo or Microsoft, which might attempt to negotiate for rights.
"It is inappropriate for the resolution of a class action lawsuit to effectively create an 'anti-compete' clause," Simpson said, "which precludes smaller competitors from entering a market."
Neither does the group think that Google's plan for orphan works is acceptable.
"The danger of using such works is that a rights holder will emerge after the book has been exploited and demand substantial infringement penalties," the letter continues. "The proposed settlement protects Google from such potentially damaging exposure, but provides no protection for others. This effectively is a barri...
In a posting on the Google Books site, the company said that the orphan books program will give authors and publishers a higher degree of granular control.
"When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to 'turn off' that title," the site notes. "We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn...
Nonetheless, organizations ranging from the American Library Association to intellectual property experts have raised concerns over the settlement.
Google has been making some aggressive moves in the digitized book space.
On March 19, Google and Sony announced that Google would make its free public-domain eBooks available on the Sony Reader, effectively increasing the size of Sony's eLibrary by 600,000 books.
It was the first time that Google had made its scanned books, downloadable in PDF format, available for an eReader in ePub format.
Google is also facing another legal tussle over a trademark lawsuit by Rescuecom Corp, over ads linked to keyword searches.
A U.S. appeals court ruled on April 3 that Google should continue to defend itself against the computer repair company, which alleged in the original suit that Google had recommended a competitor to attract customers to their site by using Rescuecom's trademark as a keyword.
Google countered that its use of Rescuecom's trademark with regard to the competitor was an internal one, and thus exempt from any commerce-infringement argument.
The appeals court seemed to agree, stating in a written decision that "Google's recommendation and sale of Rescuecom's mark to its advertising customers are not internal uses."
Last week, our colleague Mauricio Carrillo, Video Content Manager, did a presentation about FXStreet at Orlando MoneyShow expo. He explained how our main tools and news can help the Forex traders in their daily operations, learning efforts and strategy development.
He went through our Forex News, Economic Calendar, Live Video Channel and our Forecast Poll.
Here below you have Mauricio’s presentation… you might discover interesting tools you did not know!
"On many measures, we're now well beyond what we saw prior to the 2008 Financial Crisis."
There are several dynamics currently at play in the global equity market that are rather unprecedented, whether that’s the sustainability of profit margins, the monopolistic power of several popular large-cap U.S. tech companies, or central bank policy.
Profit margins usually have a strong mean-reverting tendency, yet they’ve remain elevated, particularly in the U.S. At the same time, the dominance of FANMAG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon and Google) has created substantial barriers to entry in their respective markets. Then there is the massive i...
Greg Bainbridge, chief investment officer at Raintree Wealth Management, is no perma-bear when it comes to the outlook for equity markets. But he does expected lower returns going forward than what the market has become accustomed to.
The ongoing rally in global equities has made this difficult for investors to accept, yet Bainbridge likes to remind clients that we’re still somewhere near the halfway point of the market cycle.
Edmonton, Alberta-based Raintree Financial Solutions was founded in 2010, and oversees more than $700 million in client assets, solely in the private alternative investment space. In an effort to provide a broader range of offerings, Raintree Wealth Management was created to build segregated portfolios focused on more ...
Managing risk is a focal point at the firm, and is achieved through active asset allocation, tracking long-term potential future returns, and a macro-oriented focus. In the current environment, valuations are a constant topic of discussion, and Bainbridge noted that U.S. stocks are the third-most expensive (other than ...
In addition to diversifying client portfolios not only by asset class, but also by investment strategy through an allocation to a tactical investment that uses a quantitative approach, Bainbridge highlighted the use of an absolute return fund and simply using cash.
When it comes to cash or other short-term investments that can be redeployed quickly, Bainbridge noted that the firm’s blended portfolios currently sit at about 15 per cent.
“It has the benefit of protecting in a downturn, but also allowing you to recapture a lot of that market upside when markets do turn up,” he said.
Another strategy the firm is fond of, especially at market tops, is put selling. Bainbridge noted that the historical returns behind this approach are very similar to investing in the broader equity market.
“When investing in the whole market, you earn a return by the market appreciating or moving up. With put selling, you earn a return by collecting a premium. So if you’re paid in the same amount for taking on the same amount of risk, those returns should be relatively equal,” he said.
Bainbridge also pointed to the firm’s focus on high-quality companies, noting that in adverse markets, investors typically flock to businesses with stable and growing dividend, relatively conservative balance sheets, a history of profitability, and high barriers to entry.
“Those types of businesses are the ones we want to be owning right now,” he said.
Bainbridge highlighted AltaGas Ltd. (ALA/TSX) due to its dividend yield above seven per cent, a more conservative balance sheet relative to peers, and from a valuation perspective, a price-to-book ratio close to 1.
“If you look at how the market has beaten them up recently, I think it’s pretty overdone,” he said, adding that AltaGas’ valuation is on par with where it was at the bottom of the 2008 recession.
The "nonpology" is a corporate standard: a company does something terrible, and then it tells you it's sorry that you found its behaviour upsetting. But HP's October 2016 public statement on its secret, aftermarket attack on its customers' property has made important advances in the field of nopologyology.
Last March, HP printer owners got an automated "security update." After running this update, HP customers would not have detected any outward changes their printers' behavior. But inside, the affected HP printers were secretly counting down to September, when the printers suddenly began rejecting ink cartridges with th...
After thousands of customers for third-party cartridges complained online, the story began to come into focus, and it became obvious that HP had deliberately installed time-delayed self-destruct code on its customers' property to punish them for failing to order their affairs in the way that was most profitable to HP. ...
The ensuing press-storm prompted HP to issue its nonpology, a misleading document whose absurdity I will now discuss, with some assistance from various former HP employees -- including one 18-year HP printer division veteran -- who contacted me on condition of anonymity in order to help me translate the document from H...
HP starts by saying that it only blocked cartridges with "cloned third-party chips" but that "third party cartridges with original HP security chips continue to function properly." HP's "security chips" are on-board computers with many functions, including recording the ink-level in your cartridges. When a cartridge is...
In reality, what HP is saying, "We block all third-party cartridges, and unless you know the trick, we also block original HP cartridges if you refill them."
HP has a patent on these chips, but HP has lost a judgment against a Dutch company called 123inkt.nl when it tried to use that patent to shut out 123inkt's cartridges. HP's printers know which region they're in (that's how UK HP printers are able refuse to use ink bought in the USA) and the company could have chosen to...
Further down in the nonpology, HP promises to make things right for its affected customers (the ones who didn't throw out their printers, anyway) with "an optional firmware update that removes the dynamic security feature." People who want to decide for themselves whose ink they'll use have to visit HP's support site, ...
My ex-HP sources tell me that updates pushed out via the automated method -- like the sneaky one HP sent out last March -- have a 95% or better installation rate. But optional patches, like the one that puts things back the way they were before HP's shenanigans are installed by fewer than 1% of HP customers. HP dispute...
If you're in the minority that can figure out how to run the update -- if you're a GNU/Linux user, you'll need to install a Windows emulator, and then buy and install a copy of Windows first -- don't get cocky. HP also notes that it "will continue to use security features to protect the quality of our customer experien...
Translation: the next update could take away your ability to print with third-party ink, but you'll be notified when the update arrives.
You could opt to refuse all future updates to your HP printer, assuming you're willing to leave out future security updates. Given that previous attacks on HP printers have allowed attackers to intercept copies of everything you print, search printed documents for credit-card numbers, and use hacked printers as a stagi...
Even if you're not an HP customer, you're affected by this. There are hundreds of millions of HP products in the field, and the owners of those printers have been shown that HP will hide anti-features in their security updates, so running those updates may result in your printer being rendered less useful, or altogethe...
HP is already facing two class action lawsuits (so far), and a favorable outcome for HP's customers will do some good at scaring off future manufacturers from trying this tactic on their own smart devices -- but it could also hasten the day when every device sold in the USA comes with a binding arbitration agreement fo...
Printing is in decline, thanks to mobile phones that make paper boarding passes, grocery lists, and family snapshots a thing of the past. HP's actions are the thrashings of a desperate company in a dying industry.
The best word to describe Passengers would be “frustrating”. The new sci-fi film stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as two characters who wake up 90 years too early from cryosleep on a spaceship making its way to a new world - and has one of the purest hooks you could want. It's a story full of twists and turns, w...
Sadly, it’s also a massive waste of potential. Passengers isn't a worthy addition to the sci-fi genre’s cerebral wave that we’ve seen over the past few years - failing to hold a candle next to Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and Arrival - and at points feels like a derivative version of other recent sci-fi offerings...
The worst part, however, is Passengers' third act. During that portion of the film, Laurence Fishburne gets a rushed cameo as a newly-awoken crew member who swiftly finds he has two hours to live, while the psychological drama of the movie's first half gives rise to an action movie full of disconnected set pieces, cont...
What really makes Passengers a disappointment is that it has been hyped for so long. It placed third on the Black List in 2007, the always lauded list of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood (it’s previously featured Argo, Chronicle, The Prestige, (500) Days of Summer and Spotlight), was originally set to star Kean...
The 2007 version of the Passengers script is, in general, a stronger piece of work, with a more unique sci-fi vision than the derivative construction of the finished film. It better develops its characters and their place in the world, and while some of the dialogue is a bit more hokey, there’s a more distinct tone to ...
As you might expect, the third act was where things changed the most for Passengers. The general idea is still there - the ship's problems are caused by a stray meteor and things begin to tumble after a third person wakes up - but everything is more coherent in the original screenplay. For starters it’s better set up (...
It’s thus the real disaster part that's the most different, with things much more frantic, yet less visually resplendent (the change was likely to give a typically blockbuster finale). There's none of Jim having to hold the reactor vent open with only a door he removed using the heat of a blow torch as a shield before ...
It doesn't need saying that the original Passengers script's ending is much darker than that in the actual film, taking the theme of isolation in space to its absolute extreme, as well as giving a genuine reason for Aurora's ultimate cooling on Jim's morally-reprehensible behavior; it doesn't defend his actions, but sh...
Passengers is a big disappointment and many of its problems lie in the shooting script draft. Neither Pratt, Lawrence nor Tyldum are at their best here, but it's the ultimately-nonsensical story that really hampers the film. Would the original script have led to a better movie? It’s debatable, seeing as the original sc...
What is unquestionably better, however, is the ending in the original Passengers screenplay versus that in the finished film. So often with alternate versions of stories, the allure of what might have been overpowers creative reasoning (see the planned great-grandchildren reveal, which would have been just as troubling...
PwC’s Insurance Tax team is the market leader in the UK. The London based team is offering exciting opportunities for a Manager to join this growing team.
The role will require the ability to provide strong support to Senior Managers and Partners in delivering an extensive range of services to a wide range of insurance clients.

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